Monday, December 24, 2012

1)It’s
way back in January, 2012.You live in Fairbanks Alaska,
in a small cabin with no plumbing. As a research professor, you do a lot of
professing – mostly about climate change, and how it is causing Alaska to catch fire,
melt, and sink into the swamp – sometimes all at the same time. However,
climate change notwithstanding, it's forty-six below zero here in Fairbanks.The sun did not rise more than one degree
above the horizon during its brief visit today.What should you do?

If you head out for a session of vigorous skiing with an athletic group
of friends (or perhaps strangers -- it’s hard to tell under the balaclavas), go
to 5. If you load yourself, your marvelous husband, and your
knock-knock-joke-telling twins on a plane headed south, go to 8.

2)Yes,
sugar works wonders as a motivator.Following in this precedent, lollipops and candy corn are major factors
in powering the twins -- along with one of their little buddies -- through
their first 10k race, the Midnight Sun Run. The three pipsqueaks breeze across
the finish line, Cinderella-like, at the stroke of midnight.

If you think that the logical next step would be sign up the same three
six-year-olds sign for the Kids’ Equinox Marathon – and also take themover ten miles of mountainous, wind-blown
trail to Tolovana Hot Springs –try 3.If
you’d like this narrative to return to yourself, take an egotistical hop to 6.

3)Sure,
why not?Kids love hiking!Entertainment along the trail is varied, but
includes a strong focus on out-of-key singing and name-carving on
tree-fungus.

If you decide that car-camping might have been a better idea, go to 4.If you’d prefer to do something deeply
startling and irresponsible, try 7.

4)Excellent
choice. The sun is shining, and given that it’s mid-May, the river ice has all
but disappeared.We’re in that brief ten
minutes of calm before the mosquitoes appear in full force, so it’s the perfect
time for some quality outdoor time with a veritable gaggle of friends.Remember, socializing is important, now that
you’ve reached those Middle Years.It’s
not like college, y’know, where you tripped over like-minded nerds in every
lecture hall.

If you want to broaden your social horizons by hanging out with the
parents of other hip-high people, proceed to 9.If you just want to regress and dig up all those old college friends
again (and not only via Facebook), try 10.

5)Excellent
choice.After all, you’re training for a
couple of hundred-mile ski races – one in February and one in March – as well
as a hundred-mile mountain bike race in June, a half-ironman triathlon in July,
and a trail-marathon over a mountain in September.You wouldn’t want to completely embarrass
yourself at every single one of these events, would you?Um, would you?

If you proceed with your exercise regimen by skiing amongst your friends' houses, stopping at each abode to
eat cookies and/or peculiar European boxed fruitcake, go to 2.If the rest of your training consists of
bike-commuting three or four miles to work and hiking at a 1mph pace with your
offspring, go to 3.

6)Ok…it’s
your fortieth birthday!Time to party!

If you decide to celebrate your maturity by going camping with a horde
of small children (what – you thought this was all about you?), go to 4. If
you’d prefer to have an entertaining midlife crisis that leads to the sort of
behavior that could not possibly be included in a holiday letter, try 7.

7)Oh,
for heaven’s sake, what did you expect to find here?Go back to 4.

8)Welcome
to the southern realms! Arches
National Park is,
according to the rangers, inhospitably cold in January.But given that it’s about 100 degrees warmer
than Fairbanks,
you’re not complaining.After a fine
start during which one of your kids pukes in your amazingly uncomplaining
brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s kitchen, you drag along the twins -- plus
their six cousins -- for some fantastic vistas, breathtaking rock formations,
and desert hiking.

When the four-year-old nephew proves uncertain that he likes hoofing it
for mile after mile, and the older kids are leery of heights, should you (5)
provide piggy-back rides, or (2) hand out more gummi-worms?

9)Great!
There are so many eminently entertaining, immensely time-consuming, and
irredeemably messy things to do with kids and their doting caregivers.You wallow in kettle corn at the fair. You commit yourself to orchestrating a very
crimson made-up holiday called Cranberry Festival.You trudge the snowy streets with a herd of
chubby-looking creatures on Halloween. You hob-nob at birthday parties – chilly
pool parties, violent piñata parties, and one at which you pretend to be
Minerva McGonagall.

As the year draws to a close, should you and a friend volunteer to
co-lead a table at the University Park
Elementary holiday craft fair?If so, go
to 11.If you’d prefer to drag your
parent-friends into a six-gingerbread-house baking fest, go to 12.

10)Conveniently, a college friend is getting married, and he
and his fantastic bride have invited a large percentage of your college friends
to a gorgeous retreat in Monterey
California. Best of all, it turns out that everyone is
just as much of a dork as they were back in 1994. Major themes include doing jigsaw puzzles, playing Apples to
Apples, and flying kites.

If you decide to leave the kids
with a babysitter and join the friends playing mock-Jeopardy, proceed to
11.If you take the kids whale-watching,
go on to 11 anyhow.

11)Mercifully, you have one child who does not end up either
freaking out or vomiting at this event.Too bad about the other one.

If you still think you might be able to make something of this year --
and yourself -- through zealous use of humor, irrational optimism, and limited
sleep, dive right into 12.However, if
you have entirely given up on the concepts of sustained accomplishment and
personal dignity, go straight to 13.

12)Time flies, and it’s Solstice.The good news is, you’ve almost made it to 2013!The bad news is, it’s forty-six degrees below
zero again, and the sun is once again only up for three and a half hours each
day.

If you decide, weather be darned, to attend
two different outdoor Solstice parties, both of which involve regressive
behavior and setting things on fire, go to 14.If you choose to take part in a dawn-to-dusk race in which you hoof it up
and down West Ridge for eighteen miles in temperatures known to congeal propane,
go to 14 anyhow.And if you decide to
bake three pecan pies, roast chestnuts, and sew handmade gifts for everyone in your
13-person community all in the space of 48 hours… still go to 14.

13)I kind of thought I’d find you here – either that, or
hanging out at 7.

Ok, fine.Go check on 7 again,
then proceed to 14.

14)Collapse on the window seat in a thermal sweatshirt
with stains all down the front.Gaze
helplessly at the piles of laundry, odd mittens, and overdue library books. Eat
a large hunk of baking chocolate and a handful of Zippy Zoo vitamins. Write a Holiday Letter.

THE END

Happy holidays everyone.Best wishes for an exhilarating, hilarious,
and fulfilling 2013.And to all a good
night.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

“Are your kids pre-registered?” The
perky young woman was smiling at me from her perch in front of the racks of
diminutive ice skates. Out on the rink, the five-and-under crowd wobbled
and crashed like plump little bowling pins. In just a few minutes, it
would be time for the Big Kids.

I
gestured to my two first-graders. “Well, Molly is signed up, but Lizzy
says she doesn’t want to skate. Will there still be room for her in the
class if she changes her mind and wants to join in on Thursday?”

The
instructor gave me a bemused look, but nodded. “Yeah, we’re not
full.” She hesitated. “She has to be six, though.”

“Oh,
she is,” I assured her. Never mind that Lizzy hasn’t yet hit forty
pounds, and was wearing size four snowpants that were only a mite short on her
-- while Molly’s size sevens were only a tiny bit too big. Lizzy was
six. Just like her sister. “They’re twins,” I added, as Molly eagerly
tied her own laces and Lizzy attempted to hide behind my leg.

The
ice-rink woman looked from one girl to the other and back again. “Um –ok.”
Obviously, she thought I was gravely mistaken and possibly slightly
deranged. However, I probably wasn’t dangerous, and I’d just given her a
check. Besides, she had several other snub-nosed, pig-tailed athletes to
contend with. If I wanted to insist that my kids were twins – or clones,
for that matter -- she wasn’t going to argue.

And
I, for my part, saved any explanations for later. I’ve discovered, over
the past few years, that there are a lot of people out there who don’t know
much about biology. Ok, I take that back – I’ve know that for
decades. More specifically, I discovered that a lot of people don’t
understand where babies come from… if those babies happen to be twins. Not that
I can fault this ignorance. Way back in 2005, I hadn’t given the
phenomenon much thought, either.

That
fall, Jay and I were briefly under the impression that we were going to have a
baby. As in, precisely one baby. That was before the
ultrasound technician started giggling.

Much
as I enjoy mirth, it’s a bit humiliating to encounter it when half-undressed
and smeared with viscous jelly in a room that smells like Medical
Procedure. “Um, what?” I said. Then the technician turned the
screen towards me. It was pretty darn obvious what she was showing
me. Sure, they looked like blobs, but there were two of them.
Two. A pair. TWIN blobs. Oh, gods.

Fraternal
twinning is not so complicated, really. In fact, the kids will happily
explain it. “We came from two eggs and two sperms!” Yes, dear,
thanks for sharing information about my over-exuberant ovaries with the grocery
cashier. You two are indeed dizygotic, and thus no more related than any
other sibling. However, you both hogged my uterus at the same time, just as you
are both now trying to hog the shopping cart.

Identical
twins, on the other hand occur when a fertilized egg splits. They are
monozygotic: one egg, one wee little sperm. Identical twins have
matching DNA. Molly and Lizzy… do not.

Laced
into her clunky brown borrowed skates, Molly set herself upon the ice with
determination. Her eyes were on the teacher, but they were also on the
kids around her. I could practically hear her thoughts. That boy in
the helmet who looked at least eight? She was faster than him. The
little guy in the hockey gear? He’d fallen at least six times
already. Her big friend Jacq was fast, but not THAT fast. She’d
be fast, too. Really fast. The advanced class at the other end of
the ice were twirling, hopping, zooming, and whacking a puck. Even as
Molly staggered and flopped and struggled to her feet again, they were in her
sights.

Meanwhile,
Lizzy sidled her bottom closer to mine on the bleachers. She was watching
her sister, and Jacq, and the other skaters, but her eyes were most often drawn
to a little boy not much larger than herself. He was fully geared up, but
still standing on solid ground, holding onto the rail near the entrance to the
rink, and refusing to take even one step onto the ice. When gently
cajoled by his mother or sweetly encouraged by a fresh-faced college boy whose
infinite good humor and gentleness made me rethink my college-hockey-player
stereotypes, the little guy didn’t yell or protest – merely tightening his grip
and whispered, “No. No, I don’t want to.” Lizzy was riveted.

Seven
years ago, when I first saw that fateful ultrasound, a lot of things flew
through my mind. Primary among them, given that I’d gone to the
appointment alone, was How on earth am I going to break this to Jay? Then
there were the practical considerations. How are we going to fit two kids in a small cabin? How much will
I resemble the Goodyear Blimp in another six or seven months? Is it even
physically possible to nurse twins, and does it involve some sort of
tessellated stacking? But fast on the heels of worries about time,
money, and will-I-ever-be-able-to-get-more-than-20
minutes-of-sleep-at-a-stretch (answer: no) were the more existential questions.
What does a non-twin know about
raising twins? How is it different from “regular” parenting?How can I raise two kids who – having
shared everything from the womb onwards -- are nonetheless wholly individual?

In
truth, Jay took the news better than I did, and not just because he wasn’t the
one who was going to be eating for three. He simply is not prone to
Chicken Little histrionics (neither am I, normally – but he’s even better).
We’d build on a bigger extension to our cabin, he said. Our finances were
fine. Everything was going to be ok. As for the Deep Philosophy of
twins – he wasn’t sweating it.

We
didn’t know, then, whether the kids would be identical or fraternal.
Sometimes identicals share some of the hardware of pregnancy – amniotic sac,
placenta – but if the split is early, they look just like fraternals on an
ultrasound. Of course, identical twins always have identical genders
(notwithstanding the charmingly hetero-flexible twins in Shakespeare’s Comedy
of Errors), but even in later ultrasounds our little blobs were being
coy. We knew we had somebody who was most-probably an Elizabeth, and somebody who might have been a
Molly -- but then again might have been an Isaac. Neither of us cared a
whit about the gender, but truth be told, I was hoping they’d be
fraternal. “I want them to be different from each other,” I told Jay.

Next
to me on the ice-rink bleachers, Lizzy wasn’t saying anything, but she was
leaning forward, still hooked by the drama of Little Hesitant Child. The
beneficent college hockey player/instructor offered to hold his hand.
Then he offered to hold BOTH his hands. My opinion of hockey players rose
several more notches. At last, still with obvious reluctance, the little
boy let go of the wall, let go of his mommy, and allowed himself to be led
(gently, gently) onto the ice. Lizzy made no comment. She didn’t
look at me, although her warm little body was still pressed up next to mine.

Six
years ago, Jay assured my pregnant self that the kids would be different -- even if they were identical. He was
being Mr. Reasonable. Also, he didn’t have morning sickness. I knew he
was right, because I have friends with identical siblings as well as friends
with identical sons, but still I worried. I’d never bothered to ask those
friends exactly how they’d managed to forge their identities, and whether it had
been a fraught process. “What if we mix them up when they’re newborn?” I
asked.

“Well…
maybe we can label them,” my husband suggested. I’m not sure if he was
thinking of string, or duct tape, or perhaps Sharpie.

And
then our kids were born.

Admittedly,
all the OTHER babies boxed up in the nursery looked kinda the same as one
another. Sure, the hospital went ahead and gleefully tagged our offspring
with a veritable lost-luggage-department of scribbled plastic. But to us
two doting parents. Baby A (henceforth Lizzy) and Baby B (definitely not
Isaac) each had a face, a manner, and an awesome newborn style all her own.

And
so it went. They nursed simultaneously, but… differently.Let’s just say that if I needed someone to
unplug a blocked duct with the voraciousness of a vacuum hose, I knew which
child to use. One of them insisted on walking at ten months, using a Full
Combat Crashing learning style.The
other waited until she could cruise bruise-free, three months later.Watching them parse the zucchini, bamboo
shoots, carrots, tofu, and onions in a single order of Thai vegetable stir fry
is like hanging out with Jack Sprat and his wife. And, of course, they
don’t look the same. This is particularly confusing to the friendly waitstaff,
because (interesting, like almost all of Asia) Thailand doesn’t produce a whole
lot of multi-zygotic multiples.

A
half-dozen years into the adventure, I’ve gotten over both the practical
worries of twin parenting – and, for the most part, the esoteric ones,
too. We’ve entered an era of separate classrooms, separate play-dates and
occasional singular parental attention. And while there are some
activities that are compulsory for any offspring of ours (yes, you have to
learn to read… and you also have to learn to ski many miles into the wilderness)
ice skating is not one of them. Go ahead. Be your own person,
kid.

The
smaller but nonetheless older twin –
Baby A -- sat at my side for the rest of that first skating lesson.Silent.Watching.Kids wobbled,
staggered, and fell.Jacq tried a
turn.Molly held her arms out like a
sapling and waddled onward.And a small
boy in an over-large helmet held hands with a very big and very patient young
man.

When
the session ended, Little Shy Little Boy wobbled off the rink with the rest of
his cohort, his face wreathed in a gentle smile. Lizzy glanced briefly at
her sister, who was exuding both exuberance at her efforts and frustration at
not yet reaching Olympic caliber. But I knew Lizzy wasn’t taking her cues
from Molly when she told me, calmly, “That looks like fun. I’ll try it
next time. But just once… to see if I like it.”

“Ok,”
I told her.“It’s up to you.”

Ultimately,
we attended two entire skating sessions of eight lessons each, and Lizzy skated
in every one of them – slowly, cautiously, calmly. Before each session, I
stopped at the little office next to the rink to borrow skates from the young
instructor. By the third week or so, she didn’t raise an eyebrow when I
said, “One pair of tens, and one pair of thirteens… for the twins.”

She
rummaged on the shelves and came back with the appropriate sizes – each just
exactly right for one all-herself kid. “Definitely not identical,”
the skating teacher said. And she grinned right back at me.